THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, October 23, 2019 |A
in today’s dollars. Above all,
though, she believed that American
art was as good as the European
kind. It was her conviction, as she
wrote in the catalog to one of her
1935 group shows, that America’s
greatest artists spoke “a broad uni-
versal language rather than an ex-
pression of limited provincial-Clockwise from above: Georgia
O’Keeffe’s ‘Poppies’ (1950); Edith
Halpert at the Downtown Gallery,
surrounded by some of her artists,
in a photograph for Life magazine
in 1952; Stuart Davis’s ‘Egg Beater
No. 1’ (1927); John Marin’s ‘From
the Bridge, N.Y.C.’ (1933); Charles
Sheeler’s ‘Americana’ (1931)ism....The artists live the life of
America and in the work shown re-
flect the American spirit of today.”
So they did—and so did she.Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama
critic, writes “Sightings,” a column
about the arts, twice monthly. Write
to him at [email protected]. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: GUILD HALL MUSEUM; THE JACOB AND GWENDOLYN KNIGHT LAWRENCE FOUNDATION/ARS, NY; ESTATE OF LOUIS FAURER; ESTATE OF STUART DAVIS/WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART; WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART; METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART; MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUMJacob Lawrence’s ‘The Music Lesson’ from the ‘Harlem’ series (1943), above; William King’s ‘Edith Halpert’ (1959), top rightFORMOSTOFUS,art dealers and
gallery owners are the missing links
of art history. Unless you’re a col-
lector or a well-informed historian,
you probably haven’t heard of any
of them. For people of a certain age,
the only dealers ever to have been
widely known by name in this coun-
try were Joseph Duveen, the man
who sold Europe’s Old Master
paintings to America’s gilded-age fi-
nanciers, and Leo Castelli, who was
largely responsible for spreading
the word about Pop artists and
other luminaries of the ’60s and
’70s. Yet they’re the essential mid-
dlemen who help get art out of the
studios and into the hands of col-
lectors—the first step on the long
road to posterity.
Consider the case of Edith Halp-
ert, the founder of New York’s
Downtown Gallery, which opened in
Greenwich Village in 1926 and soon
became one of the most influential
galleries specializing in modern
American art. Not only did she sup-
port and figure prominently in the
careers of such important painters
of the time as Stuart Davis, Arthur
Dove, Marsden Hart-
ley, Jacob Lawrence,
John Marin, Georgia
O’Keeffe, Charles
Sheeler and Max We-
ber, but she was also
instrumental in bring-
ing American folk art
to the attention of ma-
jor collectors like
Abby Aldrich Rocke-
feller (they shared a
special liking for tradi-
tional weathervanes).
Thousands of
paintings and other
works originally sold
by Halpert now hang
in such public collec-
tions as New York’s
Museum of Modern
Art, Boston’s Museum
of Fine Arts and
Washington’s Phillips
Collection, most no-
tably Lawrence’s celebrated “Mi-
gration Series,” which chronicles
the Great Migration of a million
blacks from the Deep South to the
industrial north in the first half of
the 20th century. It was Halpert
who arranged for Lawrence’s 60
canvases to be acquired jointly by
MoMA and the Phillips, one of the
most significant museum pur-
chases in the history of 20th-cen-
tury art (MoMA is currently dis-
playing its half as part of its
inaugural reinstallation). Yet she
vanished from the collective mem-
ory of the art establishment when
her gallery closed after her death
in 1970, and today her name is all
but unknown.
Now New York’s Jewish Museum
is seeking to bring this seminal fig-
ure back into the modern-art con-
versation by presenting “Edith Halp-
ert and the Rise of American Art,”
the first exhibition to be devoted to
her career. On display through Feb.
9, it contains 100 works that were
either sold by Halpert or went into
her personal collection, which was
auctioned off in 1973. Organized by
Rebecca Shaykin, who has also writ-
ten a first-rate monograph, “Edith
Halpert, the Downtown Gallery, and
the Rise of American Art,” that dou-
bles as the catalog, it’s a compact,
elegant show that is both compre-
hensively informative and a delight
to visit.
“Edith Halpert and the Rise of
American Art” also gives its view-
ers an opportunity to acquaint
themselves with the history of
American modernism prior to the
rise of Abstract Expressionism in
the ’40s. Few museums (the Phillips
famously excepted) go out of their
way to feature modern American
art that predates the emergence of
such New York School masters as
Willem de Kooning and Jackson
Pollock. Yet the work of the earliest
American modernists is every bit as
exciting. To see such paintings as
Davis’s “Egg Beater No. 1” (1927),
Sheeler’s “Americana” (1931) and
Marin’s “From the Bridge, N.Y.C.”
(1933) is to witness the electrifying
spectacle of ambitious American
artists translating Old World
styles—Cubism in particular—into
the up-to-the-minute vernacular of
the New World. Viewing their work
in this show, you can see for your-
self how the long-accepted narra-
tive of the postwar “triumph of
American painting” by the Abstract
Expressionists fails to tell the full
The Jewish Museum
recovers and honors the
legacy of a seminal art
dealerLIFE & ARTS
Edith Halpert,Forgotten Impresario
She championed American modernism while ensuring that regular people could afford art
SIGHTINGS| TERRY TEACHOUT
story of American modernism.
Another Davis painting on dis-
play at the Jewish Museum, his
study for “Ready to Wear” (1955),
dramatizes an equally fascinating
aspect of Halpert’s career: her de-
termination to market art not just
to wealthy collectors but to ordi-
nary middle-class people. It was
one of more than 150 pieces owned
by Milton and Helen Kroll Kramer,
a New York couple (he was a doc-
tor, she was a textile designer)
who bought art on the installment
plan from Halpert’s galleries, a
hobby to which Look magazine de-
voted a 1950 feature story called“$50-a-Month Buys a Big Little Art
Collection.” At nine-by-seven
inches, the study for “Ready to
Wear” is one of the smallest paint-
ings in the show, yet it explodes
off the wall with the jazzy exuber-
ance of a large-scale Davis canvas.
A Russian-Jewish émigré with a
passion for the new who got her
professional start working for
Macy’s and other department
stores, Halpert believed no less pas-
sionately that fine art was for ev-
erybody. She sold lithographs by
Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hop-
per and Arshile Gorky at her annual
Christmas sales for $25 each, $